Falls Park drowning: Rescuer's grab saved boy, reached into his past

Apr. 4, 2013

Cory Lawrence looks down Wednesday at the spot where he helped rescue Garrett Wallace with the help of Madison Wallace and Lyle Eagle Tail underneath the catwalk at Falls Park on March 14. / Jay Pickthorn / Argus Leader

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The two were fooling around on a hog barn at their parents’ farm outside of Lennox when the younger brother grabbed a power line hanging near the building and was electrocuted.

“I beat myself up over that for a long time and made a lot of bad choices,” Lawrence said this week.

Three weeks ago, Lawrence pulled a foam-coated 6-year-old boy named Garrett Wallace from an icy river, just moments after the current swept away the boy’s sister and a stranger who had jumped in to save him.

Lawrence and a friend had been holding onto that stranger’s hand for five minutes before the Big Sioux pulled them away. The sister was holding onto the stranger.

In the end, they were lost. But the boy, barely older than Lawrence’s brother had been, survived.

In the weeks since the rescue and tragedy at Falls Park — and the decades since the loss of his young brother — Lawrence has begun to understand that sometimes the best you can do is all you can do. And that this time, though two people died in the Big Sioux, he was able to save a child.

The tragedy of his youth has come full circle.

He’d skipped class that unseasonably warm March day to go to Falls Park. Part of him knows he shouldn’t have been there, but he also knows that Wallace might not be alive otherwise.

“I do believe everything happens for a reason,” Lawrence said. “That’s how I’m choosing to look at it.”

Garrett Wallace’s 16-year-old sister Madison and 28-year-old Lyle Eagle Tail died trying to save the boy March 14. The teen’s body was recovered the following day. Eagle Tail’s body was pulled from the river March 16.

Lawrence watched them both float away.

The Lennox native recently moved home and had begun taking GED classes at Southeast Technical Institute.

He and his friend had been at the park for about a half hour, when they walked across the catwalk just west of the Falls Overlook Café.

That’s when they looked down and saw Garrett and Madison Wallace.

“He went to step on the foam and just disappeared,” Lawrence said of the boy.

Lawrence rushed down to the rocks, but Madison Wallace already had jumped in after her brother. He took off his jacket and began batting at the foam that had covered the child as Madison began floating away.

That’s the first time he tried to climb in, he said, but he slipped, and his friend caught him.

Then Eagle Tail appeared.

“He offered to be lowered down, for us to hold onto him,” Lawrence said.

Eagle Tail took a jacket in his left hand and held fast to Lawrence and his friend. Madison Wallace struggled through the foam for about a minute, pulling herself toward Eagle Tail by the jacket before grabbing onto his leg.

The chain held for about five minutes, Lawrence said.

“We were talking, he kept saying, ‘pull me up, pull me up,’ then he was yelling at his friends to come grab his other hand, but nobody came,” he said.

The weight, the water, the foam — it was too much. Eagle Tail slipped away in front of Lawrence and the onlookers.

“I went to try and drop myself in, and (my friend) grabbed me and told me not to go down there,” he said.

“That’s when I realized that if she hadn’t done that, they would have been looking for three people.”

Lawrence then looked to the spot where Garrett Wallace had fallen in and saw the foam moving. Lawrence pulled the boy out and wiped him off. He took off his own shirt and put it on the freezing child.

Lawrence estimates that police were on the scene 30 seconds after Eagle Tail and Madison Wallace floated away.

He hasn’t met the Wallace or Eagle Tail families. He went to Madison Wallace’s funeral, but said it “didn’t feel like the right time” to talk to her parents and siblings.

Fire Chief Jim Sideras referenced the heroic actions of Eagle Tail, Wallace and Lawrence without saying their names Wednesday, the day after a house fire claimed the lives of Sulmi Guerra-Sandoval, 29, and Eli Galicia, 2.

Guerra-Sandoval handed three children to passersby who had stopped to help upon seeing smoke coming from her window. One of them, Cullen Dossett, had Guerra-Sandoval’s hand when she let go and went back in to try and save Galicia.

“I can still see her face. The terror on her face will haunt me forever,” Dossett said.

Lawrence knows the feeling. He still sees the face of Eagle Tail. He’s still haunted by how things might have turned out if officers had arrived earlier, if someone else had tried to help.

“Each day has its ups and downs. Each day it gets a little easier,” Lawrence said.

If Lawrence met Dossett or Warren Vick, the other man who helped lower the children to safety in the fire, he says he would shake their hands and thank them for doing what they could to help.

“I’d tell them to stay strong,” Lawrence said. “They did the best they could.”

That’s the reality Lawrence and his friend have had to come to accept in the weeks since Garrett Wallace fell in the river.

It’s a reality he wasn’t ready to accept 20 years ago. This time around, he understands the importance of doing what can be done. This time, he said, he’s thankful for the good he was able to do for the 6-year-old boy and the two heroes who didn’t make it.